Education Home | Kim Hyun Jung’s Portraits of Korea: Inner Beauty – The Perfect Rest After Eating Alone
A piece from Korean painter Kim Hyun Jung's column series 'Portraits of Korea,' this installment — 'Naesoong: The Perfect Rest Atop a Solo Meal' — uses the work Naesoong: The Perfect Table to explore the fatigue and incomplete rest hidden behind Korea's solo-dining culture. The column has been confirmed as distributed to and reprinted by more than 50 overseas outlets; this text is the original press release prepared for distribution to Chinese media (recovered from the artist's blog backup).
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These days, Korean society endlessly preaches the art of 'eating well and living well on your own.' Companies talk about individual work-life balance, and the media package eating alone and drinking alone as a new-generation lifestyle. But behind this lies an exhausted body and mind. Eating alone is less a form of freedom than the shadow of a labor structure that doesn't even allow the leisure to eat together with others. Everywhere we're told to take care of ourselves, yet the time and money that would actually make that self-care possible are quietly pushed back onto the individual. What the exhausted reach for isn't an expensive resort, but the screen of a delivery app. I find it uncomfortable that a society that tells us to 'love yourself' actually reduces even the most basic rest to a matter of individual self-management skill.
Kim Hyun Jung, Naesoong: The Perfect Table, 130 x 162cm, ink and light color with collage on hanji
The heart of this painting is the delivery box. This disposable box lays bare the transience and improvisation of our lives. Like the cardboard piling up at the door today only to vanish tomorrow, our rest, too, always rests on some makeshift arrangement. A late-night meal eaten after coming home from overtime, worrying about tomorrow morning. Not a table set for family, but a combination of dishes chosen just to prop up an exhausted body. The black sauce of the jjajangmyeon and the greasy sheen of the sweet-and-sour pork are far from the virtues of health and moderation, yet this meal is still a small ritual that confirms one is alive. The smartphone screen auto-playing short-form videos flickers on, like a signal from a mind that wants to stop thinking. Here, perfection isn't a balance of taste and nutrition, but a mental blank in which, if only for a moment, one doesn't have to judge anything at all.